Religious Educator's Memo by Sierra-Marie Gerfao

[Memos from Rev. Barbara Merritt and Rev. Tom Schade]

R E L I G I O U S   E D U C A T O R ‘S   M E M O

The other day outside of BJs, I dropped my wallet as I was loading my car.
Totally oblivious, I nearly got into my car and drove off without it, but
fortunately a woman ran to me and let me know what happened.

This was a far cry from the experience I had a couple of years ago when
someone broke a window on my car Sunday morning during church and stole my
purse, which I had carelessly and trustingly left on the floor of the
passenger side. The church in Olympia is set far back from the road at the
end of a cul-de-sac across from a few small farms on the edge of town, in a
heavily wooded area. The location is not ideal because it takes some
explaining to get people there (although they are now working on getting an
access point at the main road). Though the church is mid-sized, it has more
trees than people. The last thing one might expect coming out of church on a
Sunday morning is a burglarized car. It just seems like it would be too much
effort for a burglar to find it. And even if the burglar had been a
desperate churchgoer, my car had been parked directly in front of a number
of windows. However, my car indeed had been burglarized, and my purse was
missing.

Gone was my cell phone and all its contact numbers; a pay stub with my
social security number on it; my checkbook; a debit card; a church credit
card; my glucometer; my insulin; a set of supplies for my insulin pump;
membership cards; two gift cards; wallet sized photos of my son as a newborn
baby; and my driver’s license. Gone was the passenger side window of my car.
I spent weeks trying to piece my life back together, canceling the old and
obtaining the new. My driver’s license was the most work. The cost of
replacing the window was the most expensive. I spent the most time
monitoring my credit for identity theft.

Just before this last summer, the experience came full circle when my purse,
heavily weathered and stinking from the elements, turned up in a schoolyard.
There wasn’t much left, but the kind school receptionist went through the
disgusting remnants, found my phone number, and called to let me know that
my purse had been found. She even stored the stinking thing in a bin for me
until I could retrieve it.
Almost all people have a deep desire to be good people, to do “right
 things.” There are aberrations in human behavior, sometimes survival needs
come first, occasionally we get off track, and on plenty of occasions we are
misguided. But most of us are driven by a deep down desire to be decent.
There is a website, http://wallettest.com, devoted to the old “wallet test
experiment” in which wallets are purposefully left in public spaces and then
tracked. In that particular run of the experiment, 74% of people who found
wallets attempted to return them to their rightful owners.

So here we are. Decent people who want to do good things. And like many
people of faith, we are called to do good things for the larger world, as
well as personally and in our immediate community. The very covenant of our
Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations binds us to that spirit,
reading things such as “we affirm and promote. . . .the goal of world
community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” The sources of our
faith include, “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to
God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves,” and the “words and deeds
of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and
structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of
love.”

Such lofty ideals these are, but we go at them like champs! Each in our own
way, of course, with our own interpretations and priorities, but
nonetheless, we go at them. Not only that, but most of us with children
teach these ideals to our children with a hearty enthusiasm. Many of our
children even become little social activists. Myself being raised a
Unitarian Universalist, I remember breaking up fights in my junior high
school to “encourage peace and goodwill” as I would tell my mother.

This is my first in a two-part newsletter series on social justice. In a few
weeks, when I write to you again, I am going to propose some ideas about the
ways we serve our children’s ministry needs—and a few ways we fail to do so—
through our congregation’s quest for a better world. In the meantime, I’d
love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Warmly in Faith, Sierra-Marie

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